On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote: Probably yes, but not in a box but in a separate article. I think I saw one once, a separate article on stats for a country, but I can't remember where I saw that. When some infoboxes are longer than a small article, you know something has bloated somewhere. I looked at United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States And the number of sub-articles is mind-numbingly large. Many of those have sub-infoboxes, so maybe too much is being put in the main country infoboxes? Here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States The weather articles are similarly stats- and table-heavy. I'm sure they are useful, but do people really use them? Carcharoth

2009/3/3 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Yeah, but the more information we put in the infoboxes, the harder it becomes to find the most frequently requested bits - area, population, etc. I'm all for us being helpful to the people who want to know abtruse demographic data, but if we can do it without the schoolkids looking for "population" getting overwhelmed, so much the better! Perhaps this would be an excellent use for the show/hide buttons we're getting on a lot of templates -the "demographics" section giving you a population figure and an option to show another forty sets of statistics, for example. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think the point is that some people find them distracting, so the information could be organised better. A good infobox acts as a summary for the most-needed and salient information. Other data should, technically, be relegated to other infoboxes on subarticles, while still retaining some way of presenting all the data in one place for those who want that as well. It's not easy to work out what the balance should be, nor to organise the mass of available data on a country. When wanting examples of bloated infoboxes, I tend to look at chemical elements and planets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth Though actually, the thing that annoys me most about infoboxes is that if there is one bit of data I'm looking for, it invariably isn't there. I then Google it (though I should really find the time to add it to the Wikipedia article). Here is a test. Imagine you are looking for a rough value for the diameter of the Earth. Try finding it quickly in our article on the Earth. How long does it take you to find the value you want, and what distracts you along the way? Did you find what you wanted in the infobox or in the text of the article? Do the same to find a rough value for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon distances. Is this information easy to find? Is it presented in an accessible way? Try using out Earth article to find out that a rough value for the Earth-Sun distance is. It's roughly 150 million km as any bright schoolchild will tell you, but in our Wikipedia article, that is buried deep in the article and in the infobox it is presented as three orbital characteristics (aphelion, perihelion, semi-major axis). Maybe the answer is that Wikipedia doesn't do "rough" answers, but I know other websites that present such data in more accessible ways. Try finding, on Wikipedia, a table showing the distances of the planets from the Sun. It seems to be here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_in_hydrostatic_eq… Incidentally, the Earth-Moon distance is in the first sentence of Moon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon And wonders of wonders, it includes "about thirty times the diameter of the Earth" - which makes the data accessible and informative. :-) [Both "Moon" and "Earth" are featured articles, btw.] Carcharoth